PM's critics make a mockery of political debate

By Anne Summers

March 2, 2013 — 3.00am

ON Q&A last Monday night, Malcolm Turnbull described, with unusual candour for a politician, how it felt when he lost the Liberal Party leadership in December 2009. It was ''very, very gut-wrenching, it was devastating'', he said. No doubt Kevin Rudd felt the same way. And Brendan Nelson, and Kim Beazley and Simon Crean and all the other leaders who in recent years have been dismissed by their parties.

Now that these political assassinations are more often than not conducted under the media spotlight, the defeated leader is expected to front the cameras, be brave, be sporting, not cry (even if, as happened to Kim Beazley, you've just learnt of the sudden death of your brother) and, most of all, move on.

Under fire ... Julia Gillard.Credit:Mark Graham

Politics is a pitiless business.

But it is also increasingly absurd the way the media no longer waits for leadership failure; it now anticipates it and, with no attempt to disguise its bloodlust, makes the presumption of a change in leadership the prism for day-to-day coverage of politics. Such is the fate of Julia Gillard, whose demise is confidently predicted on a daily basis by the politician commentariat. If her party doesn't get her, the voters will. Either way she is dead, politically speaking.

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Gutted ... Malcolm Turnbull.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Such is the confidence of the journalists and shock-jocks and others who peddle these opinions, that they see no need to wait for history to happen. Why bother waiting for the actual voters to actually vote when these pundits have persuaded themselves that already it's all over? As a result, they feel no obligation to respect the person, let along the office of prime minister, since in their minds she is already gone.

So they feel free to mock her in ways that would have been inconceivable with other leaders and, as recently as a year ago, even with her.

Gillard has always had to put up with intense, often unfair and sometimes cruel commentary about her clothes, her voice, even her body shape. As I have documented, since she became Prime Minister Gillard has been subjected to vile sexual and at times pornographic vilification of a kind that is new to our political vocabulary (and which still continues).

But now there is a new element. The pundits are scoffing and mocking her every action, from her new glasses to every policy or political step she takes, as if to say: why bother, lady, it's all over anyway.

They are mocking her plans to spend a week in western Sydney. (No one mocked Tony Abbott when he spent a week in Aurukun with indigenous communities last year.) They are mocking the name of the place where she will stay because Rooty Hill is seen to have sexual connotations. The obnoxious Larry Pickering, who continues his cartoon offensive against Gillard, this week drew her at a place he labelled ''Nookie Knoll'' with the Prime Minister, as always in his cartoons, carrying an enormous dildo. (In fact, I understand Rooty Hill was so named in 1802 by Governor King after a hill on Norfolk Island that had been difficult to dig because of the number of roots under the surface of the soil.)

They are mocking her, openly and shamefully, when she tries to communicate with the Australian people. When Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan this week tried to talk about the G20 meeting they have secured for Brisbane in November 2014 - a gathering that will bring many millions of dollars of income to the city and state - all the media wanted to know was whether the visit to western Sydney meant she was ''campaigning'' rather than ''governing''.

That they even had to ask the question was another cause for mockery: fixing the election date eight months in advance is seen, not as an admirable introduction of some certainty into the year's political calendar (as The Australian Financial Review's Phillip Coorey stood up and said at the National Press Club when Gillard announced it), but as further evidence of ineptitude. She's such a loser, this woman, they say. Ergo, everything, every single little thing she does, is wrong, stupid, ill-judged, and thus both the reason she will lose the election and why she deserves to.

The media, and those in politics who push a similar line, justify using this circular reasoning by reference to the opinion polls. These have been universally bad for Gillard in the past few weeks, no doubt about that. Last week, the Age/Nielsen poll had the Gillard government trailing the opposition 44-56 on the two-party preferred vote. On those numbers Gillard cannot win.

But you'd think only the foolhardy, or those with no memory (or even ability to Google), would make firm predictions about election results on the basis of polls seven months out. John Howard experienced similar, or worse, polls even closer to elections that he subsequently won.

In 1998 his government sat at 44-56 11 weeks out from the election that he went on to win 49-51 (the Coalition won a majority of seats despite Labor winning the popular vote). Again in 2004, with the media asserting confidently that he faced ''a landslide defeat'', Howard was at 44-56 five months from the election that he won 53-47.

This time, apparently, it's different.

This time, voters are not just waiting for Gillard with the proverbial baseball bats. This time, according to Senator Nick Xenophon, ''some of them almost have a nuclear missile''.

The hatred of Gillard is such that voting her out of office is not enough. She has to be nuked.

Really?

''It's a devastating business, a terribly cruel business, politics,'' Malcolm Turnbull said on Monday night. ''Because all of your mistakes and blunders are out there in the public arena. You've got nowhere to hide. There is not an ounce of privacy.''

Nor, in the case of Australia's first female Prime Minister who, we were reminded again this week by the (female) Liberal candidate for the western Sydney seat of Lindsay, has no children, is there the slightest drop of mercy. Or respect.